Font changes (or not) in copy/paste

  • Thread starter Thread starter Barbara Graham
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Barbara Graham

I have 12 users who are all at different locations and who are all advanced
users of Word. There is a document that these users have to open via
Internet Explorer and then copy and paste it into a Word document. For
about half of these users, the font changes (and we don't want it to). For
the other half, the font does not change (which is as it should be). I have
not found anything yet to explain this. Does anyone know what would cause
this? They are all using Word 2000 or newer.
 
Those using Word 2002 should check how their Paste Options are set.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
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Hi Barbara

Suzanne and Sara have already proposed two possible reasons for what you're experiencing. Here's a third.

Recent versions of Word are quite cluey about copying and pasting from Internet Explorer. In particular, if web pages have used the
<H1>, <H2> etc tags, then Word will put that text into its built-in Heading 1, Heading 2 styles, with some added direct formatting
just to confuse us all.

So, the results when pasting from Internet Explorer into Word will depend (in part) on how the Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles are
defined within the Word document into which you're pasting.

As a test, create a document. Modify Heading 1 to be Times New Roman in red, and Heading 2 to to be Times New Roman in green. Now,
copy and paste all the text at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ (coming from w3.org, you can be sure it's very clean, pure HTML). You'll see
that colours and fonts of the headings match the styles in your document, not the styles in the web page.

If this turns out to be the problem, then the solution is to create a template with styles set up as you want them to be (notably,
get the normal style and the built-in heading styles as you want them). Either store it in a User Templates location that everyone
can access, or distribute it to each person and get them to put it into their User Templates folder. When they need to copy and
paste the web page, get them to do File > New and choose your new template. Then paste. You should then see standardized results.

The following page doesn't consider this particular scenario, but it discusses related issues, so it might be useful:
http://www.ShaunaKelly.com/word/styles/FormatOfTextChanges.html

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word
Melbourne, Australia
 
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